


Troublesome

by Penknife



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Character Study, Childhood, Gen, The Qun (Dragon Age)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-16 12:34:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21508018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penknife/pseuds/Penknife
Summary: Tama has always had a talent for troublesome children.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 45





	Troublesome

Ashkaari is Tama's best-loved and most troublesome child. She is skilled at troublesome children, and has more than once offered to take over the care of a child she felt was not being well-handled by one of the other tamassrans in the creche. The Qun, in her opinion, is not best served by forcing ill-fitting pieces into simple and identical molds, but by finding each piece its proper place to shine in a vast and complex puzzle. She has been rewarded again and again by seeing children who others thought too stubborn or too strange blossom and thrive in her keeping. 

The boy did not appear to be a troublesome child while he was still at the breast. He was a big, healthy baby whose broad shoulders and striking size suggested that he would someday serve the Qun as a soldier. If his eyes followed people early, if he began trying to mimic the first sounds of speech early, it was likely because strangers and other children assumed he was older than he was and treated him so, and he responded to what was expected of him as any child would. 

By the time he is weaned and comes to her, he is already forging swiftly past the first words of baby talk to a fascination with patterns and numbers and names. He learns the names of colors and wants to know everything they describe, red, red, red, and then, blue, blue, blue, until she has found colors in places she never looked for them to satisfy his thirst for more. 

_Ashkaari,_ she calls him, at first teasing, and then approving, her philosopher, her clever child. A child's first nickname isn't a decision, but it's not free of meaning, either. It might smooth his way to call him by a name meant to suggest the uses of his great strength, but already some part of her isn't sure. 

The next few years should reassure her. Ashkaari is big and strong and fearless when the children play at fighting, winning at wrestling games and games with sticks and who-can-hold-the-hill most of the time with ease. He laughs when he wins and laughs as easily when he loses, taking pure delight in the game and the chance to use his strength as it was meant to be used. He does not flinch from pain, but uses it to spur himself to greater effort. All of that is right for a soldier. 

And yet he is so clever, and so full of questions. _Why, why, why_ , he asks, and she sees not stubbornness, but a thirst to understand the insides and undersides of things that will not serve him well as a beresaad. What makes the sand run through the hourglass always at the same speed? Why is one child's drawing more lifelike than another? (Neither drawing is his own.) What lands lie beyond the Waking Sea, and why do people live there? Don't they understand that things are better under the Qun? 

These are questions for an ashkaari, and for a while Tama tells him stories about all the things there are to investigate, old ruins and the workings of devices and the history of a dozen different peoples. It would be an uphill climb for her to persuade anyone that this child's path is the path of a scholar. They will see the way he wins the games, the way he takes an uncomplicated joy in testing his strength against that of another, and they will believe they have their answer. 

She watches him more closely, trying to assemble evidence that might support a different view. It isn't a hardship to spend more time with this child. By rights, she shouldn't have best-loved children. It's her job to love all the children equally well, to show them that love isn't a matter of possession or blood ties but a gift that everyone deserves. But there are always some who touch her heart in a way she can't and won't deny. 

When she watches Ashkaari, she finds herself more unsure than when she began. He is strikingly patient with the younger children, teaching, encouraging, stopping them from misbehavior when he sees it begin. He tells her when a child seems ill, and when she feels the girl's forehead, it's warm. He tells her when a child is tempted to sneak sweets between meals, and she finds the boy with his fingers on the latch of the forbidden pantry door. 

Even in the fighting games, he shows so little real anger. He's always quick to help up his opponent if he won, or bouncing up cheerfully ready to play again if he lost. These are games for children, but they're meant to hint at the truths of violence, to provide the first taste of what it is like to deliberately set out to hurt another person. She sees a spark of that ferocity when he's hurt, a waking brightness that might one day be a singing fury in his blood. And then he knocks another child to the floor too hard and sheds the _other_ boy's blood, and he's on the floor at once fussing over the wound he's made— _hey, I didn't mean to, are you all right?_ In those moments, he sounds very much like a tamassran. 

She is still wavering, still telling herself it's too soon to be certain of anything, when he begins to play tricks on her. They are lighthearted games, ways to obey the letter of her instructions while still getting away with something. It's hard not to be amused when he finds a loophole she unwisely left in the rules. At first she is amused, until she begins to understand that this is not a thing that will change about him, this determination to bend every rule to see how far it can be bent. 

And that is complete disaster. It frightens her enough that she tries being stern, after having been tolerant for far too long. _What did I mean?_ she insists, and when he tells her—he can always tell her—she insists that he must do what she meant for him to do, not only follow the letter of the words she said. He obeys because she says with steel in her voice that it is the rule, but she can see the set of his shoulders change, see the words _but why_ forming and dying on his lips, and she can tell that for the first time in his life with her, he truly does not want to obey. 

A beresaad being ordered into battle must obey his commander's orders without question or thought. An ashkaari may range farther, but risks more; to follow a forbidden line of research while justifying it to oneself as somehow not having been specifically forbidden risks infecting thousands of others with mistaken ideas. Tama is all too aware that more damage can be done with ideas than with blades. 

_Tamassran_ might be the best answer. There is considerable latitude permitted in interpreting rules when dealing with something as complicated as the training of children or the care of minds and bodies through sex. There is considerable latitude permitted in teaching viddathari about the Qun, and Ashkaari accepts the Qun with a whole-hearted devotion that could bring others following in his path. 

And yet she has always felt it unnecessary to suggest to a child the possibility of being Aqun-Athlok. In her experience, those children who are truly meant to live so either know it from the beginning, with an easy confidence that assumes any attempts to name them the other gender are silly adult mistakes, or come to her hurt and frightened and desperate, when they begin to understand that they cannot live as their body suggests they should. 

Ashkaari seems to be certain that he is male, and seems to be confident he will be a soldier as the other children assume. It does nothing to calm her fears that she isn't entirely certain he is confident of either thing. At nine, the boy is beginning to understand the things that everyone around him expects him to believe, and he has a tamassran's talent for pretending what he does not entirely feel. 

She pretends that she is confident and sure, but she begins to sleep as badly as she did in the months before one of her former best-loved children manifested the powers of a sarabaas. She tries to give Ashkaari the same calm reassurance she gave the girl in those frightening months, that all lives serve the Qun, that the only disgrace would be to turn from the path laid out before him. She folds her fear and her lingering grief into the little hollow in her chest that is the only place she permits them to live, and then finds that in her distraction, she has bitten her fingernails to the quick. 

The boy is nine years old, and she is running out of time. She will have to make a recommendation for his future training soon, and any path she can see wrecks on the shoals of too many ways that he is not suited. To be an arvaarad would use his quick eye and his determination to protect, but the boy is frightened of magic and demons, a fear that still haunts him even if he no longer wakes calling for her to protect him from the shadows at night; to hold the chains of a sarebaas requires the confidence to keep both mage and keeper safe. Any role in the army would require the ability to obey without questioning, without teasingly twisting the order into a shape that suits the child's quick mind. 

And if he will not fit at all—if she has allowed the child to stray too far from any of the roles he might have grown to play, or if he was always too stubborn and too strange for her to mold him—then they will take him from her and give him qamek, and he will serve the Qun with his strong back alone, the light in those quick and measuring eyes forever put out. 

She tells herself she has no fear that this will happen. It has never happened to her yet. (It is not her fault that the girl who might have been a tamassran became a sarabaas, she tells herself, and almost believes it.) 

The next time Ashkaari asks her, _Tama, how will I serve the Qun?_ , she tells him, _I don't know yet. But I am sure you will serve with all your heart._ He seems untroubled, returning to his games and to his studies, helping to clean the common areas after dinner, throwing himself tired and cheerful into bed hard enough to make the bedframe shake. She scolds him for that, because he has been told to be more careful, and he smiles sideways as he says he's sorry, pleased with himself because he knows that he nearly made her laugh. 

She goes to bed late, and closes her eyes without thinking at all about the troublesome boy, and wakes with tears on her face and the treacherous, inexplicable thought: _I could take him. We could run._

She breathes, letting the thought wash over her like water, trying not to let it shake her to the core. She would be more frightened if she weren't well aware as soon as she is fully awake that she can do no such thing. All questions of belief and morality aside, for a tamassran in charge of children to become Tal-Vashoth would cast doubt on all her charges, past and present. Drastic measures would be taken to prevent the corruption from spreading. However much she loves this child, she cannot sacrifice the rest to save this one. 

It is possible that she should present herself to the re-educators for even thinking such a thing, but she is the master of her actions if not of her thoughts, and after a while the rapid beating of her heart slows to a more normal pace. She will take this to one of the tamassrans who sees to the pleasure and comfort of others, and confess her possessiveness of one of the children in her charge, a common enough failing to be unremarkable. She will put herself in merciful hands that can scourge and soothe, and be punished enough to be comforted. 

And, when she thinks about it—the sun now streaming in her window, the sound of the children already stirring prompting her to begin dressing quickly and neatly—it's possible that she's given herself the answer to the question of the boy's future, after all. 

The Ben-Hassrath would provide a solution to her unsolvable problem. They prefer their agents to be unremarkable in size and appearance, the better to pass unnoticed in a crowd, but surely there are circumstances where appearing to be a soldier will provide an admirable explanation for Ashkaari's presence. And they will take his measuring gaze, and his quickness to understand who might be tempted to wrongdoing and why, and use them to serve the Qun. 

The only thing that troubles her is why she hasn't come to this decision before. She has turned this particular beloved puzzle piece round trying to fit it in any number of unsuitable places, and yet something in her has held back from suggesting the Ben-Hassrath. He wants to help others, she tells herself, and this is a way for him to help. It is proper and merciful to find people who are thinking of turning from the Qun and teach them why they are wrong. 

And if not all those methods are gentle, if not all those decisions are easy—her own decisions are not always easy. This is a decision that she can defend with confidence, and explain just how it will serve the Qun. And perhaps, this way, they will not take her generous child who hurts when anyone else is hurt and make him a weapon that can only kill. 

When she tells him what has been decided for his training, she can see him settle into the idea, pleased, proud, a little relieved as most children are relieved to know what their future will be. Then he looks up at her, as always a little too curious, and asks her, _Are you proud?_

_I am proud that you have found your way to serve the Qun_ are the words she ought to say. 

_I will always be proud of you,_ she says instead, because she loves her most troublesome child far more than she should, and hopes he is folding the words away in a secret place in his own chest, something for him to keep.


End file.
